Jason Collins: Game Changer of the Year 2013

It’s the strangest thing. Now, with six months of hindsight, the announcement Jason Collins made at the end of April seems to have been inevitable, so commonsensical. Even—almost—less than momentous. That was the accomplishment, the quiet way this giant man made inevitable what had previously been unthinkable.

This is partially due to style, both literary and personal. Collins began his historic Sports Illustrated cover story thusly: I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay. In twelve words, Collins had established a correct sense of the moment and its proportions; while tacitly acknowledging that he was not—and not trying to be seen at the same level as—a Jackie Robinson, he was also refusing to hide behind any false modesty.

The order of those three sentences was deliberate, Collins says now. I do identify myself as a black man before I identify myself as a gay man. It was also important for me to put my age and the length of my playing career before the fact that I’m gay. Twelve years is a long time in any professional sport. I felt that that longevity speaks to something—and to the fact that I’ve earned a right to speak.

The 3,000 words that followed were just as clean, clear, and unfussy. And seminal: For a hundred years, tens of thousands of men had played professional football, basketball, hockey, and baseball; until Collins wrote what he wrote, none had publicly acknowledged being homosexual prior to retirement. Yet nothing Collins wrote seemed wrought. His subject was wrought, of course. Collins addressed what it was like to live in denial and fear. But he struck a tone of calm recollection that bore no whiff of plea, repff Nothing looking to capitalize. Just a plain self-assessment to which there could be only one response: Of course. The man was irrefutable, yet the force of his story seemed to come not from Collins but from us, and our collective conscience.

Collins’s coming out was met with a near unanimous embrace. But that unanimity has allowed a certain forgetfulness to set in, along with a vague suspicion that that embrace was a foregone conclusion. I had no idea how it would be received, Collins says now. It had been two years since Kobe Bryant had decried a ref as a faggot. It had been a month since the emergence of videotape showing Rutgers coach Mike Rice flinging that same word (along with basketballs) at his players during practice. And it had been two weeks since the release of 42, which underlined the fact that while professional sports had led the culture in breaking racial barriers, the locker room now lagged far behind the culture in terms of tolerating homosexuals.

Before the SI story, I was only willing to make a private gesture—the number 98 that I wore last season, for the year Matthew Shepard died, Collins says. Whenever anyone asked, I said I was trying to mess with the refs. He uses the fingers of both hands to mimic a ref laboriously signaling a 9 and an 8 to a scorekeeper. It’s funny. I was able to use my reputation as a rough player as a cloak. (Collins is a seven-foot, 255-pound monolith who led the league in fouls during the 2004&#x2013;2005 season.)

In late April, Collins hosted a small gathering at his home in Los Angeles, where he read the essay aloud. His parents were present, as was Franz Lidz, the SI writer with whom Collins partnered. This was my first time reading it, and I wasn’t reading it privately but out loud, says Collins, who had come out to his family in the summer of 2012. I felt I was discovering my own story. I kept stopping and exclaiming, Hey, this is me. In front of my parents! It was like being present at my own birth. Except it was my parents who were doing all the crying. My mother, especially. She had been the most apprehensive for me. And then she and my father were just so happy, proud, relieved. When we were done, I could just see the weight that had come off of her. And that was when I realized that I felt the same way.

As this article goes to press, Collins, who split his 2012&#x2013;2013 season between the Celtics and the Wizards, remains a free agent. When asked, Why aren’t you playing? he responds with his own rhetorical question. You see me, right? I’m in excellent shape. Right now I feel what I’ve felt for the last twelve years—that when I’m running up and down the court with my opponent, I’ll have that voice in my head saying, I trained so much harder in the summertime than this! There’s no way you’ve worked as hard as me! I’ve put the time in. I’m ready.

It’d be a good thing for the world if Collins plays again, but it won’t diminish his impact if he doesn’t. Because nothing about Jason Collins’s story was inevitable—neither the breaking of the barrier, nor the seeming ease with which Collins did it. It was another step in breaking down barriers and allowing people who are uncomfortable with homosexuality to get into an unavoidable conversation, says Lakers point guard and future Hall of Famer Steve Nash. It’s a first step for many people. Undoubtedly it helped that there is nothing in Collins’s personality that hungers for the iconic—that he never framed his coming out as anything more than an assist. The ball had already been rolling, he says. I just wanted to do my part and give it a push. His role in the culture now parallels the role he’s always played in the NBA—not as a star but as a solid, a guy known by players as a wise and steadying locker-room presence and by fans as an enforcer who sets the hard picks and screens that allow others to break on through.

The greatest moments of my career have come when I’ve set the picks that have allowed the immensely talented players—Jason Kidd, Rajon Rondo, Vince Carter, Joe Johnson—to take over, he says. I’ve always been that role player. I guess I finally realized that role could extend beyond the court.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.